Key Components of a WordPress Site
There are some things that need a bit of explaining before we get much deeper. For lack of a better term, we’ll call them “components.” Components represent the main parts of a WordPress site, including the actual files that make things go, and the database that houses all of the data. Together, these two components - the files and database - generate the web pages for your site. Once generated, there are two central types of these web pages, the Admin area that only you see, and the public pages that the whole world can see. Let's take a closer look at each of these different components.

WordPress Core Files
When you go to WordPress.org and download a copy of WordPress, you are down­loading the WordPress core files. It’s a big folder full of files and a few subfolders full of even more files. Once you download and unzip the WordPress package, you’ll notice that most of the file and folder names begin with a “wp-” prefix.

The WordPress core files are the things that make WordPress tick, the things that make WordPress a complete software package. Most of these files you’ll never touch. A few of them you’ll touch very rarely, and a certain subset of these files you’ll be in and out of all the time, especially when building a theme.

WordPress makes controlling the content of a website easy. It can be done by you, or you can train another person to do it, because the Admin area is as intuitive as it is powerful. WordPress gives you the keys to build sites easily with all the modern features that clients crave. And because WordPress is free, open source, and has fostered a giant community around it, you’ll always be in good hands. WordPress has changed the face of publishing content on the web, and we are all reaping the benefits. For all these reasons and more, we can safely say that WordPress is amazing.

How to Optimize and Secure WordPress
Out of the box, and with a full cup of common sense, WordPress is a reasonably se­cure software package. But if you are up to snuff as a web designer/developer, you understand the importance of security and know that it is up to you to do every­thing possible to keep your site safe and secure. There are a slew of precautionary measures you can take to help with security, and we’ll show you all of them. Things like locking down sensitive files, checking file permissions, and using various mani­festations of "security-through-obscurity."

While we are at it, we'll customize our sites to streamline and optimize the effi­ciency of WordPress. Many of the things that can make WordPress faster are also things that can make any site faster, like reducing HTTP requests and optimizing images. But there are many WordPress-specific things you can do as well, like cach­ing data, keeping your database optimized, and reducing the number of database queries.

The developers of Joomla are aware of the importance of good Web site ranking. They have provided a number of options for a Joomla site to make itself as SEF as possible. By spending a little time with configuration settings and a little due diligence when posting new content, you can use the Joomla features to increase the opportunities of your site and to obtain high placement on the search sites.

With the adjustment of only a few global options, Joomla implements the changes for all the rendered con- tent pages. As usual, implementing these features in Joomla requires only a few clicks in the Administrator interface.

By default, all Joomla URLs reference the same Web page (index.php) and use query string parameters to specify individual menus or articles to retrieve. For example, the URL to a standard Joomla article might look something like this:

http://www.example.com/index.php?Itemid=27&option=com_content

To a search engine, this URL is confusing. A search engine spider (the program that indexes a Web site) isn’t very good at discerning that the query string holds the ID reference to the article. In general, a query string is just as likely to hold site visitor parameters as references to particular content. Here is the URL with query string for a common Web site that includes a query string ID:

Joomla has made administration generally very easy. However, as a site expands, managing the existing content, user authentication, and keeping the system clear of dead or outdated data can become a real chore. There are methods for handling all of these problems, largely thanks to Joomla’s embrace of open standards and compatibility with a large number of technologies.

 For infrastructure-wide user authentication, Joomla is compatible with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers that can also be used to manage users on other server types. For handling old content, menus, and users, you can either use the Joomla Administrator interface or directly query the Joomla database tables using MySQL tools. Most of the Joomla maintenance on even a larger system can be accomplished without having to resort to expensive or complex system tools.

LDAP Authentication
LDAP is an implementation standard that provides ways to centralize access authorization. Instead of requiring a separate login for each of numerous systems a client might use, a single authorization con- tained in an LDAP directory can provide authorization to all of those systems. For example, an LDAP server could contain all the user authentication information for a Web server, FTP server, CMS, mail server, and so on. That means that only a single user account would have to be administered on the LDAP server, instead of individual records at all other servers.